Two spies who were experts at keeping the biggest of government secrets were Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles and his CIA colleague, Richard Helms. Helms was the liaison between the CIA and the Warren Commission. Like his fellow OSS officers, William Colby and William Casey, Helms eventually succeeded Dulles as CIA director. Long before the Kennedy assassination, on June 6th, 1944, future JFK-assassination investigators Dulles and Helms learned that the biggest of secrets can be kept secure among the largest of groups. D-Day, the largest, most complex overt/covert operation ever known, is perhaps the best example of a successful, large conspiration. Over 5,000 ships landed 90,000 British, American and Canadian troops in Normandy. Around 20,000 more began landing silently by parachute and glider the night before. The planning had been under way since December, 1941. Yet it was a successful surprise attack. The exact time and place was known to, and kept completely secret by as many as fifty men. They struck an enemy weakened "under the combined weight of blockade, bombing, subversive activities, and propaganda."¹⁸⁶

Dulles knew how to apply that example to smaller operations. Through events that preceded and followed D-Day, Dulles became something of an expert in the secrets, successes and failures of high-level assassination conspiracies. One of the worst intra-Allied conflicts of the war was conveniently resolved when Admiral Jean Darlan, the very anti-communist, pro-Nazi, key figure in Vichy France, was assassinated allegedly by a rightist. The plotters made sure the assassination would be blamed on someone who was apparently on the same side of the political spectrum as his victim. That is not the only similarity between Darlan's and JFK's assassinations. The conspiracy behind that December 24, 1942, assassination remains a mystery to this day. However, it is known that an OSS officer was in contact with the plotters and was believed to have supplied the weapon. The man who replaced Darlan, General Henri Giraud, was principally sponsored politically and financially in Western circles by Allen Dulles.

Seven months earlier, Dulles was likely paying close attention to Operation Anthropoid: the assassination of Prague SS chief Reinhard Heydrich. That conspiracy had multiple similarities to the JFK assassination. They include: 1) a motorcade attack at a hairpin turn; 2) signals; 3) an open, virtually stopped vehicle; 4) two attacks, five seconds apart, the first inconclusive; and 5) "passers-by" directing the crowd in its confusion. And, as in Dallas, there were unanticipated mistakes in Prague.

As Alan Burgess wrote in his 1960 book, Seven Men at Daybreak, "The vital operational point was Heydrich's open car had to slow up here to negotiate the near-hairpin corner, and for perhaps five seconds it would provide an easy slow-moving target." And a report from the Special Operations Executive branch of the British Secret Intelligence Service reads: "The special training in the UK was based on a plan that the attack on Heydrich should be made when he was traveling by car from where he lived to his office in Prague or to any known appointment and that it must be carried out at a corner where the car would have to slow down." It is a chilling realization that one or both of those two sources were available to Kennedy's assassins during their own planning.

In fact, the other Twentieth Century assassination conspiracies involving attacks on motor vehicles, all of which would have been of interest to Dulles, had stark similarities to the Heydrich and Kennedy assassinations: the two, same-day attempts on Archduke Ferdinand (June, 1914); the assassination of Dominican Republic President Rafael Trujillo (May, 1961); and the attempt on French President Charles de Gaulle (August, 1962). Of primary interest is the fact that these assassinations were successful when the vehicle was brought to a virtual halt and unsuccessful when it was accelerated. There was no exception to this rule. The lesson to be derived by security planners is that it is not a good idea to slow or stop the vehicle in the face of an assassin. The lesson to be derived by assassination planners, however, is the opposite.¹⁸⁷ And Allen Dulles did have direct experience in the unsavory art assassination planning.

In his book, Heisenburg's War, Thomas Powers wrote about Werner Karl Heisenburg, Germany's top nuclear physicist. The OSS was nervous about Germany's atomic bomb research. Allen Dulles was the director of an OSS assassination plot against Heisenburg in the fall of 1944 -- using former major league baseball player Morris Berg as the designated assassin. It is in the context of this conspiracy that we read the only mention of OSS officer William Casey in Powers' book. Casey and Berg met to discuss that plot the night before Berg departed Britain for his abortive assassination mission in Germany. Casey, then involved in running agents into Germany, later became the CIA Director who was stricken with a seizure the day before he was to testify to the Senate about the Iran-Contra scandal. Finally, just months before directing the Heisenburg plot, Dulles had been involved in the 20th-of-July plot to assassinate Hitler. That attempt was a failure not because of the large number of conspirators, but because of an ineffective bomb. In fact, even in failure, some of its plotters and their secrets escaped detection.¹⁸⁸

Those assassination plots are all examples of how, despite careful planning, anything can happen in a military-style operation. Anticipating D-Day, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel said to his aide, "Believe me, Lang, the first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive...the fate of Germany depends on the outcome...for the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day."¹⁸⁹ And so it was from November 22nd to 23rd, 1963: in the first twenty-four hours, due to a misunderstanding about their "throwdown" gun which necessitated a hasty coverup, the conspirators lost. They won a long battle by concealing their defeat, but they have lost the war because their worst errors on that longest day in Dallas could only be hidden for thirty years.

Third, so what? When quickly asked, this question is the most clever and effective counterargument in the conspiracy denier's arsenal: a delay tactic known as the "so what" defense. Conspiracy realists know this tactic well. Since few conspiracy realists have time to tutor deniers through their first thousand "so whats," it gives the deniers' pseudo-certainty the greatest longevity. Even after all arguments against the conspiracy have been overwhelmed, this question can still be asked in the sense: "Who cares?" We will therefore summarize the reality of our arguments, and conclude with historical examples of the consequences of not caring about right and wrong.

As with the clip, it does not matter if the Mauser was there or not. The CIA's "Mauser" report of November 25, 1963, and the silence surrounding the CIA-translated S.I.F.A.R. report of November 28, 1963, are proof that if there was no Mauser, it was not Weitzman's imagination belatedly supported by Craig's coerced embellishments, it was a high-level attempt to create the illusion of a Mauser. Such an illusion is necessary to avoid questions about a missing (or stuck) ammunition clip and the unique way it is ejected. Whether there was a clip or a Mauser or neither or both, Oswald was framed. Because in a lone-assassin scenario in which a Mauser and a Mannlicher-Carcano clip are documented in this way, you cannot have either, neither or both.

At bottom the issue is: for over thirty years the subject of the clip was treated with either silence, or, when the subject did surface it was treated in a tortured, painful manner. It should be a simple, routine matter. It is the thirty-plus years of bizarre and implausible explanations for why the clip was "stuck" and why the rifle was called a Mauser that give away the conspiracy by exposing the single most grievous error the conspirators made: not being familiar enough with the load-fire-reload cycle of the lesser known of the only two WWII clip systems in military use during their adult lives.

On one side is the claim that the Mauser and its charger are easily confused with the Carcano and its clip. On the other, the fact that the Carcano's clip is virtually the same as the M-1 Garand's, unique in its similarity and sole difference, and routinely confused.

The former, a spin of false innocence on the conspirators' biggest mistake, is like a classic Hitlerian Big Lie: psychological confabulation repeated ad nauseam by the firearms experts and trumpeted, when necessary, by government and media "public servants." The latter, the source of the conspirators' biggest mistake, is the truth: empirical evidence that explains all of the rifle-related facts, desperately avoided by those same firearms experts and public servants.

The more important expertise exhibited by such bureaucrats -- obtuseness and a cavalier attitude toward the public -- is nothing new. It can be learned from Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf: "Just as a hundred fools do not make one wise man, an heroic decision is not likely to come from a hundred cowards....All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself." (vol. I, chs. 3, 6) Nazi Germany was utterly defeated. The same does not hold true for its ideas and the effects of those ideas.

One of the biggest lies of those who desperately try to convince the public and/or themselves that the JFK murder conspiracy is a crazy notion is the one that says we are psychologically driven to invent fantastic conspiracy schemes because we cannot accept the deaths, by less significant circumstances, of our most powerful, popular leaders. The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, appointed by LBJ after the names James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan became household words, declared that doubts about lone gunmen are "a product of the primal anxieties created by the archetypal crime of parricide -- not the inadequacy of the evidence of the lone assassin." Three decades later, National Public Radio (NPR) news anchor Robert Segal retold this big lie in the form of sound bites from three writers and scholars: Columnist Robert Wilson said conspiracies are popular because people lack the education in common scientific disciplines to understand what is happening in the world today. Unintentionally undermining Wilson's elitist view, NPR relied on a sociologist to supply the grotesque simplism that there are no conspiracies, only people with good intentions who do bad things. Similarly, Chris Carter, producer of the popular dramatic television series, "The X-Files" (which tapped into insecurities at the end of the millennium, according to NPR), said "Confusion and failure...are things that ordinary people are sadly capable of." NPR's intended message was twofold: if we judge something a conspiracy, we are ignorant. And what we perceive as conspiracies are merely common mistakes.¹⁹⁰

Whatever variation is used, the big lie of mass public retardation is another argument intended for the naive. If Americans are so emotionally and intellectually dependent on conspiratorial explanations for our leaders' questionable deaths, political and physical, we should now be inundated with national discussions about the personal tragedies, illnesses, woundings and deaths of no less than Presidents Andrew Jackson, William Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

But we are neither obsessed nor preoccupied with the misfortunes of all of those men. The problem of President Kennedy's murder is not with the psychology of the American people. The problem is with the evidence. The evidence is incongruous. Controversy and cognitive dissonance surround the subject because of 1) the reasonable conspiracy explanation, and 2) the continuing history of unreasonable dispute of that explanation.

Most Americans have, from the beginning, believed that a conspiracy was behind John F. Kennedy's murder. We are correct. Most, but not all, of that majority have also always believed that they will never really be certain in that belief. And they believe that nothing can be done to overcome that uncertainty. We all recognize that such a state of affairs is neither righteous, good, proper, nor preferable. But that pessimistic majority has resigned itself to a "reality" of hopelessness. They think they are rationally recognizing right and reality. Can they admit they are wrong? If not, the answer to Francis Scott Key's question at the end of our national anthem must be: no. Because the land of the free can only be the home of the brave.

In his book, The Last Investigation, HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi quoted his friend, Brookline, Massachusetts psychiatrist Dr. Martin Schotz, who made that very point: "He wrote: `It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.

"And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to KNOW the truth -- as opposed to only BELIEVE the truth -- is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility. It is precisely in moving from belief to knowledge that the citizen moves from irresponsibility to responsibility, from helplessness and hopelessness to action, with the ultimate aim of being empowered and confident in one's rational powers.'"¹⁹¹

Soon after Kennedy's assassination, Texas historian J. Evetts Haley, wrote that "no...prefabricated image of dynamic leadership...can substitute for a diet of truth -- for honest news....On the contrary, healthy, moral people, even when denied the facts of national life -- the truth essential to their survival -- intuitively sense that something is wrong....their confusion leads to suspicion, suspicion to distrust, and distrust to national disunity....confidence between government and governed is destroyed by mutual fear....Nor can it be cured...by any false front. The shallow deprecation of 'hate' as the cause of national tragedy; the vilification of patriots as 'extremists'...are dishonest resorts which exacerbate instead of healing the malady. Such fear cannot be banished by propaganda. It can only be restored by principle; principle based on moral character."

Ten weeks before his murder, President Kennedy pointed to progress in desegregation as an example of how such fear can be overcome: "The task was not easy....Nevertheless, as we have seen, what prevailed in these cities through the South finally was not emotion but respect for law. The courage and responsibility of those community leaders in those places provide a meaningful lesson not only for the children in those cities but for the children all over the country."¹⁹²

Little did Kennedy know how severely tested our courage and sense of responsibility would soon be, or how badly we would fail that test, or that we would continue to fail it badly for decades to come. Perhaps those decades of disrespect for law and responsibility by cowardly leaders have so blinded most people to propriety that they ask without a qualm: "Why should I care about JFK's antiquated murder?" Instead of answering such questions, government and media leaders have encouraged apathy from the beginning.¹⁹³ Ultimately, the answer is: because murder is a crime. To ignore any murder or unduly limit the punishment of any murderer is to decriminalize the worst crime, and, by extension, all crime.

Rephrasing a famous Kennedy speech helps clarify the problem: We preach the rule of law around the world, and we use force to show we mean it, and we declare ourselves tough on crime at home; but are we to say to the world and, much more importantly, to each other that murder is wrong except for those like President Kennedy's; that all citizens have equal protection under the law except from murders like President Kennedy's; that we will not tolerate terrorist acts, government coverups or assassination conspiracies except for those like the one against President Kennedy? If we as Americans, because of threats of death, cannot choose our public representatives, cannot expect them to act in our best interest, cannot encourage our children to lead, if, in short, we cannot govern ourselves without fear of our own personal safety, then who among us would be content to be a responsible citizen and stand against that threat? Indeed, who has been?

Our fear, bigotry and apathy have delayed other truths. It took thirty years, and the courage and dedication of a principled few, to say with finality the simple words: "Medgar Evers was assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith." That murder teaches us that we can finish the sentence: "John F. Kennedy was assassinated by...." The choice Kennedy gave Americans the night of Medgar Evers' murder says it best: "Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality."¹⁹⁴

Faced with the truth of conspiracy behind the JFK assassination, however, those most capable of recognizing right and reality can still be susceptible to the very bigotry they decry in others. Emory University Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, in her otherwise excellent book, Denying the Holocaust, wrote:

While there is reason to question some of the conclusions of the Warren Commission, the theories regarding the killing that have increasingly gained acceptance border on the irrational. Notions of a conspiracy within the highest echelons of American government are readily accepted as plausible. According to Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK, a coup d'état was under way in the United States, with the collusion of the vice president, Joint Chiefs of Staff, chief justice of the United States, FBI, CIA, members of Congress, and the Mafia. Stone's film imposed a neat coherence on a mass of confusing information, providing a self-contained explanation for what still seemed to be an unbelievable event. Many reviewers and moviegoers alike pondered these charges with great seriousness....

...In these instances, history is rewritten for political ends and scientific historiography is replaced, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, with "ideological conformity." Scholars who might once have dismissed these outlandish views feel compelled to treat them as having some validity.

These attacks on history and knowledge have the potential to alter dramatically the way established truth is transmitted from generation to generation. Ultimately the climate they create is of no less importance than the specific truth they attack--be it the Holocaust or the assassination of President Kennedy. It is a climate that fosters deconstructionist history at its worst. No fact, no event, and no aspect of history has any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be recast. There is no ultimate historical reality.¹⁹⁵

Dr. Lipstadt fails to understand that reasonably questioning the Warren Commission leads most plausibly to the theory of collusion of the vice president, at least one of the Joint Chiefs, the chief justice of the United States, leaders and agents of the FBI and CIA, members of Congress, and Mafia figures in JFK's murder. Where is the plausibility, never mind the scientific historiography, in Dr. Lipstadt's implied warning that investigating an imaginary, high-level conspiracy is a greater travesty than ignoring any kind of real one? Oliver Stone helped influence Congress to pass a landmark disclosure law that benefits history, knowledge and truth. Gerald Ford, the last surviving Warren Commissioner, was the first and only unelected president of the United States, a president who used his pardoning power to spare Richard Nixon from criminal prosecution, and more importantly, from further investigation. Between Stone's JFK and Ford's Warren Report, only one of them can be plausibly accused of replacing historiography with ideological conformity for political ends. Without any stretch of the imagination, Ford's Warren Report is the one.¹⁹⁶

Why does Dr. Lipstadt seriously ponder imagined similarities between Oliver Stone and Holocaust deniers, but not real ones between Gerald Ford and Holocaust deniers? The ultimate historical reality of the assassination, obvious to a large majority of rational Americans long before we pondered it as "moviegoers," has been the irrational, outlandish, unacceptable, implausible, self-contained notion that the evidence of conspiracy -- evidence which even the Warren Commission admitted exists -- is not credible.¹⁹⁷

That is the ideological rewriting of history that has already attacked knowledge and dramatically altered the way truth is established from generation to generation. It is the pragmatic cleaning of Augean stables -- not neurosis or psychosis -- that has kept us, in the words of Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris, "Returning to the mystery over and over, trying to `solve' it, to limit, to dispel it, poring over the volumes of clues, all the odd things that `do not fit' (not yet -- the assumption is they will fit if we only arrange them better), pinning hopes on a new book, on better photographic sleuthing, more debate, examination, science, reason...to find a simple, clear, demonstrable explanation...which can be traced with the weapons of reason, identified, pointed to, disposed of."¹⁹⁸ The arrangement of the facts which we have presented in this article, which does fit, is one such explanation.

If there is any doubt that such a clear and demonstrable conspiracy presents a clear and present danger, the words of Holocaust survivor Joseph Wilf dispel that doubt. Wilf was honored with the 1996 Israel Bonds Elie Wiesel Holocaust Remembrance Award, called the Crying Violin Award. In the speech he gave at his award dinner, Wilf outlined the rationalizations of the "consolers" who attempt to "reassure us" and "assuage our fear" of another government conspiracy like the Holocaust.

And yet we know that the hardest thing to predict in the 20th century is the past. Ideologues, armed to the teeth, are studiously at work rewriting history. Words foreshadow actions as lightning does thunder. When Holocaust deniers spread their venom, we survivors find ourselves again directly in the crosshairs of danger. In the 1930s, the West slumbered before the scourge. Today we must not be caught napping, even if the danger is yet relatively small. And we must stand guard against the slippery compromises that academic charlatans, clamoring to be heard, can lead an unsuspecting public to.

Survivors, as all people of conscience, must expose falsehood, catch the cunning in their craftiness. We, who have walked through the valley of death, must not be hoodwinked into silence and hurried into oblivion. We have learned the most desolate lessons that history has to offer, so horrific as to be beyond uttering. Yet we are commanded by the call of memory to speak out loudly and clearly. Not only do we owe it to ourselves, but far more importantly, we owe it to the millions of dead who can have no rest as long as the truth goes brazenly denied.¹⁹⁹

But is historiographically sufficient proof of a large, high-level conspiracy behind the JFK assassination enough to overcome the "ideological conformity" that makes even Dr. Lipstadt a conspiracy denier? The opinions of Harvard-educated journalist David Plotz, Washington Bureau Chief of the on-line Slate Magazine, indicate that a new generation of journalists are no less susceptible to the big lie than previous generations. Appearing on the C-SPAN cable network, Plotz referred to Dexter King's belief in James Earl Ray's innocence, implying that King was gullible. Plotz was making the point that there is an "incredible willingness" in this country to believe things that do not exist. Yet, just before his derision of King, Plotz derided the media for its bias against the Internet in the aftermath of the "Heaven's Gate" mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California.

As a writer for an Internet-based publication, Plotz was aware of how ignorance contributes to media bias against the Internet. But he cannot see how his own ignorance contributes to his own bias against investigating real assassination conspiracies. The most dangerous willingness to believe in things that do not exist is the continued, incredible willingness of journalists like Plotz to believe in the sole guilt of Ray, Sirhan and Oswald.²⁰⁰

As writer Paul William Roberts observed:

Even George Orwell misread Adolf Hitler's intentions in his review of Mein Kampf for the Times Literary Supplement in 1940: `I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler...The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him...It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs...He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds...One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to.'

This is salutary reading, not -- I should add -- because it makes a fool of a leftist icon, but because it makes a fool of anyone who imagines he has a foolproof ability to detect those cracks through which the night gets in.

In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, Roberts' point about journalist Orwell is destined to become a stinging and lasting indictment of most reporters. In the words of another journalist -- trailblazing press critic George Seldes -- most reporters "know from contact with the great minds of the press lords or from the simple deduction that the bosses are in big business and the news must be slanted accordingly, or from the general intangible atmosphere which prevails everywhere, what they can do and what they must never do." Thus Roberts echoes Seldes point that "The most stupid boast in the history of present-day journalism is that of the writer who says, 'I have never been given orders; I am free to do as I like.'"²⁰¹

Do Lipstadt and Plotz live in such a fool's paradise, populated by "academic charlatans" who, like they, are on record with their inability to see today's worst threats to domestic and world tranquillity, and their inability to dislike today's true fascists? If not, then perhaps to face honestly the conspiracy that killed JFK is more terrifying than facing the Holocaust. Perhaps even Holocaust scholars like Dr. Lipstadt, and highly educated journalists like Plotz can forget the dangers in believing comforting lies.

Will they, like Orwell before them, be able to overcome their denial and write more truthfully about their times? Or are they, like President Bush, merely faking blindness? It has been proved that Bush's claim of faith in the Warren Commission's minority opinion, and his alleged memory lapse about his activities the day of the shooting, represent at best, a creative relationship with the truth.²⁰²

If scholars and journalists are truly blind to that which is obvious to most Americans, they need only take a wider meaning from the words of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Nazi death camp survivor Elie Wiesel when he spoke about the Holocaust Museum -- a memorial which Dr. Lipstadt helps oversee: "To me it's very simple," he said, "If a person goes to the Washington museum and leaves saying, 'Now I don't know -- I have to learn about it,' then it's a success. If the person leaves and says, 'Now I know,' then it's a failure." Or, as Kennedy himself would have said in his undelivered speech in Dallas: "...leadership and learning are indispensable to each other."²⁰³

History warns us that the Nazis were democratically elected (complete with a minority of the vote and a February "October Surprise"); and history warns that Nazi Germany was a nation of judges, jurors and laws -- laws that decriminalized the murder of its "undesirable" citizens. The history of the JFK assassination warns us that the problem is not an ideological interpretation of the evidence by the American people, the problem is the ideological interpretation of the evidence by our most powerful government representatives and journalists; and, as with Germans under Nazism, the apparent cowardice of most Americans to resist that prevailing ideology.

During the fall of 1996, coauthor Richard Bartholomew guest-lectured for six weeks on the JFK assassination at a high school. On their mid-term exams, the senior honors history students were asked to discuss the controversies of the subject and their own feelings about it. All of the students recognized the reality of the conspiracy, and they all displayed a command of the evidence proving it and its continuing coverup.

The most thoughtful of the students went beyond the evidence and struggled with their consciences. One wrote that he had learned more than he cared to know. He rationalized his preference for ignorance with two arguments: 1) that the assassination is past and should be left as such; and 2) that "all the truth in the world will not bring JFK back." Both arguments are common. The first is a disregard for history. To believe it is to fail to understand that much of what directly effects our lives was decided before we were born. To remain ignorant or indifferent about what happened before we were born is to remain forever a child. The second argument fails with a simple counterpoint: if resurrecting the dead was the justification for finding the truth, we would live in a world of lawlessness. Other students, in an example of the ineffectiveness of the Pledge of Allegiance, espoused a less egalitarian use of their knowledge. They advocated continuing the coverup because, as one said, "the truth will lead to anarchy." That is another common misconception. Such reasoning ignores the fact that anarchy is the absence of law, that a continued coverup ignores laws against murder, and that the truth will, therefore, prevent further anarchy.

James Baldwin, author of The Fire Next Time (1963), on racial oppression, succinctly explained the causal relationship between right and reality. He once wrote that many who live with complicity in the destruction of other human beings "do not know it and do not want to know it." He added: "But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime."²⁰⁴

Doctrinaire rejection of this explanation of the facts surrounding the JFK "murder weapon," as sufficient proof of the clear and present danger of a conspiracy within the United States government, risks repeating the grave error of Holocaust deniers who, in the years preceding liberation of the death camps of Nazi Germany, indolently awaited too-absolute proof of that huge government conspiracy with its thousands of living witnesses, participants, documents, and millions of victims, known as the Final Solution. History and morality thus demand that we overcome the kind of "ideological conformity" that makes Dr. Lipstadt an authority on a past, enormous, high-level, foreign government conspiracy, yet unable to apply her expertise here and now. History tells us that the way to recognize right and reality is by learning everything we can about the conspiracy, and by speaking out loudly and clearly "against the slippery compromises that academic charlatans, clamoring to be heard, can lead an unsuspecting public to." History also predicts the consequences of failing to heed its warnings.

The ultimate proof of Germany's conspiracy was exacted at the cost of a long, bloody war. Starting on June 1st, 1944, the first half of a code message, comprised from the first two lines of a nineteenth-century French poem, was broadcast by the BBC to the French resistance: "Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne [The long sobs of the violins of autumn]." At 10 p.m., June 5th, on orders from General Pierre Koenig, commander of Allied clandestine operations, the last half of the message was broadcast: "Blessent mon coeur d'une languer monotone [Wound my heart with a monotonous languor]." It meant that D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe, the culmination of a huge conspiration, the time and place of which had been kept totally secret by as many as fifty men, had begun. The tedious, uniform, unvarying inaction against Germany's evil conspiracy had finally ended.²⁰⁵

The history of that evil government conspiracy must not be allowed to repeat itself. The monotonous languor and banality of evil that began anew in Dallas on that longest day in the autumn of 1963 must now end. As with pre-liberation evidence of the Holocaust, or even as with modern scientific evidence for extraterrestrial life, the evidence for the conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy is more than sufficient to justify and compel action.²⁰⁶ The promise -- "Never again!"-- made to the victims of the Holocaust must be kept. Maximum resistance is essential. Failure is not an option.

The irreconcilable clip paradox and the impossible Mauser claim have long been the weakest links in the coverup conspiracy chain. That insidious, heinous chain is now forever broken. As with the issue of conspiracy, there has been no reason to deny who is behind it. Smoking guns await public disclosure on that question too. Issues will arise -- issues we have not now anticipated. But we can now be a united people in that endeavor. "For in the final analysis," concluded Simon Wiesenthal, "the future will be determined not by how many Nazis there will be -- or fascists or extreme nationalists or white supremacists -- but how many anti-Nazis, people of goodwill, there will be to confront them."²⁰⁷

186. Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (New York: Vintage Books, 1982) pp. 201-202, 526; hereafter cited as Brown 201-202, 526. As with Dulles, Colby and Casey, Helms' entire career at the CIA was permeated by his involvement in the most illegal acts of that secret agency, including assassinations. It is reportedly the conclusion of the Cuban government that Helms was the ultimate author of the plot behind JFK's assassination. On Mar. 30, 1997, Helms turned 84. He can be subpoenaed under ARCA. (Powers 378-79. Claudia Furiati, ZR Rifle: The Plot to Kill Kennedy and Castro [Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 1994] p. 135.)

187. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast, (New York: Grove Press, 1993) pp. 120-21; hereafter cited as Simpson 120-21. Brown 265-73. Stephen J. Rivele, "The CIA, Assassination, and Nixon," published in Eric Hamburg, editor, Nixon: An Oliver Stone Film, (New York: Hyperion, 1995) p. 27 (Darlan Affair). Jan Wiener, The Assassination of Heydrich (New York: Grossman, 1969) pp. 86-90. Alan Burgess, Seven Men at Daybreak, (London: Evans Brothers Ltd., 1960) p. 142 ("near-hairpin corner"). Callum MacDonald, The Killing of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, (New York: The Free Press, 1989) p. 124 (SIS-SOE report). Letter from Walter Graf to Richard Bartholomew, Nov. 2, 1993 (stopped vehicle lessons). Rumors existed that General Karl Wolff, head of the SS in Italy, was somehow behind Heydrich's murder. Wolff had the right connections and, like many of Heydrich's Nazi associates, was "in trouble." Dulles' OSS colleague and mistress, Mary Bancroft, reported to Dulles that she had asked the question of Nazi intelligence official and Hitler assassination plotter Hans Bernd Gisevius: "Did Wolff kill Heydrich?" Bancroft also revealed that while Dulles was negotiating the German mass surrender in Italy, Wolff had a friendly visit with him at his Zurich apartment. Given Bancroft's subtle, yet startling, revelations about Hans Gisevius and Ruth Paine (see below), was she trying to tell us something about a connection between Dulles, the Heydrich assassination and the JFK assassination? (Mary Bancroft, Autobiography of a Spy [New York: William Morrow, 1983] pp. 193, 289; hereafter cited as Bancroft 193, 289. Letters from Walter Graf to Richard Bartholomew, Jul. 13, and Aug. 2, 1993, and Mar. 3, 1997).

188. Thomas Powers, Heisenberg's War: The History of the German Bomb, (New York: Knopf, 1993) pp. 385-86, 388, 392. Casey, OSS chief of intelligence for the European Theater and Republican strategist since 1940, became Nixon's SEC chairman and managed Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980. One of Casey's business partners, Carl Biehl, had been working with the criminal underworld since the early 1950s, including the Carlos Marcello crime family in New Orleans, members of which are suspected of involvement in JFK's murder. Casey's presidential campaign assistant, Max Hugel, was an executive vice-president of a company that had a consultancy contract with mobster Moe Dalitz and his Las Vegas casinos. JFK assassination suspect Eugene Hale Brading was a charter member of Dalitz's Rancho La Costa Country Club in Rancho Santa Fe, California. The HSCA noted that the Kennedy-hating Jimmy Hoffa and other Teamsters used that club as a national mob meeting place during Kennedy's presidency. Hugel, who had known Casey for twenty years and was in charge of organizing "ethnic, nationalities," and other voting groups for Reagan, became one of Casey's deputy directors of covert operations at CIA. Another Casey protégé, Duane "Dewey Maroni" Clarridge, became Casey's division chief for Latin America who commissioned the CIA's illegal assassination manual for the Contras. (Ronnie Dugger, On Reagan: The Man & His Presidency, [New York:McGraw-Hill, 1983] pp. 32-33. Dan E. Moldea, Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob, [New York: Penguin, 1986, 1987] pp. 294-96. HSCA, The Final Assassinations Report, [New York: Bantam, 1979] p. 20; hereafter cited as HR 20. National Security Archive, The Chronology: The Documented Day-by-Day Account of the Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Contras, [New York: Warner, 1987] pp. 8, 37, 74. Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, [Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991] p. 128. For more on Moe Dalitz and Jimmy Hoffa links to the assassination, see Evica 220, 227-30, 235-36, 244, 260-61, 276, 281, 318; and HR 217-24.) Dulles' informant within the Hitler assassination conspiracy was Hans Bernd Gisevius, one of its rare, high-level survivors. In later years, with substantial help from his friend Dulles, assassination plotter Gisevius traveled to Washington D.C., then to Texas where he became employed at Dresser Industries, the Dallas-based oil equipment company. Dulles and Gisevius were assisted in the Hitler plot by Dulles' wartime mistress, Mary Bancroft, who was Ruth Forbes Paine's close friend. Paine's son, Michael, became involved in the JFK assassination due largely to his 1963 housemate, Volkmar Schmidt. Oswald's CIA friend, George de Mohrenschildt, had introduced Oswald to Schmidt who, in turn, arranged for Oswald to meet Michael Paine and his wife, Ruth Hyde Paine. The latter Ruth Paine helped arrange Oswald's fateful employment at the TSBD. Before coming to the U.S. in the fall of 1961, Schmidt had lived in Germany. There, Schmidt had lived with and studied under another rare 20th-of-July-plot survivor, Wilhelm Kuetemeyer. From 1958 to 1967, master spy and assassination plotter Bancroft (by then the mistress of Life magazine publisher Henry Luce), "worked with JFK and RFK on campaigns and corresponded with them." Ms. Bancroft, 93, died in New York City on Jan. 10, 1997, having never been subpoenaed under ARCA (Bancroft 54, 128-31, 290. Leonard Mosley, Dulles [New York: Dial, 1978] pp. 247-48. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA [New York: Scribner's Sons, 1992] p. 367. Bruce Campbell Adamson, Oswald's Closest Friend: The George DeMohrenschildt Story, vol. I: "1,000 Points of Light (Public Remains in the Dark)" [unpublished manuscript, 1993 (Aptos, Calif.: self published, 1995)], p. 31; cited hereafter as Adamson, "1,000 Points of Light"; and The JFK Assassination Timeline Chart [Aptos, Calif.: self published, 1995] p. 80. Edward J. Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald [New York: McGraw Hill, 1978] pp. 203-05, 213-14; hereafter cited as Epstein, Legend 203-05, 213-14. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation [New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993] p. 419; hereafter cited as Fonzi 419. "Obituaries," New York Times, Jan. 12, 1997, p. 31; "Passages," Assassination Chronicles, Spring 1997, p. 49.). See also Bartholomew citation in note 166 above. For a history of Dresser's board of directors, which included powerful, wealthy, anti-Kennedy men, see Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc. 1880-1978 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979) pp. 386-89.

189. Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959) p. 8 [see also Ryan's screenplay and film adaptation of same title (Darryl F. Zanuck/20th Century Fox film production, 1962) 3 hrs]; hereafter cited as Ryan 8.

190. For an in-depth study of how pervasive ideas induced thousands of ordinary people to kill unarmed, defenseless men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity, see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) 622 pages. For variations on the fallacious theme of mass public retardation, see: Jefferson Morley, "The Political Rorschach Test," Los Angeles Times, Dec. 8, 1991; reprinted in Stone and Sklar 231-34 (quote: 232). Andrew O'Hehir, "JFK: Tragedy into Farce," San Francisco Weekly, Dec. 18, 1991; reprinted in Stone and Sklar 269-73. George Will, "`JFK': Paranoid History," The Washington Post, Dec. 26, 1991, op-ed page. David Klinghoffer, "The Sum of All Fears," The Washington Times, Dec. 22, 1991; reprinted in Stone and Sklar 283-88. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Paranoid Style," The Washington Post, Dec. 29, 1991; reprinted in Stone and Sklar 328-31. Michael Albert, "Conspiracy?...Not!," Z Magazine, Jan. 1992; reprinted in Stone and Sklar 358-64. Anthony Lewis, "JFK," The New York Times, Jan. 9, 1992; reprinted in Stone and Sklar 387-89. William Manchester, "No Evidence for a Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy," The New York Times, Feb. 5, 1992; reprinted in Stone and Sklar 451-52. Robert Segal, "Conspiracies and Coverups in Popular Culture," National Public Radio, Jun. 24, 1997, broadcast 6:53 to 6:59 p.m., CDT, on KUT, 90.5 FM, Austin, Texas.

191. Fonzi 410-11. See also Dr. E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian control, public denial, and the murder of President Kennedy (Brookline, Mass.: Kurtz, Ulmer and DeLucia, 1996) 326 pages.

192. J. Evetts Haley, A Texan Looks At Lyndon: A Study In Illegitimate Power (Canyon, Texas: Palo Duro Press, 1964) pp. 5-6. Long before the epithet "conspiracy buff," J. Edgar Hoover prejudged those who would not accept the Commission's findings as "...extremists who have very pronounced views, without any foundation for them, who will disagree violently with whatever findings the Commission makes." (5H 99) John F. Kennedy, "Southern Progress in School Desegregation," News Conference, Sept. 12, 1963, The Burden and the Glory, edited by Allan Nevins, (New York: Harper & Row, 1964) p. 185; hereafter cited as Kennedy 185.

193. Less than a month after it began in Nov. 1966, the New York Times ended its investigation of the President's murder. Assistant Managing Editor Harrison E. Salisbury explained that, "Nobody told us to stop. We just felt nobody cared." (Rolling Stone Apr. 24, 1975) Belief in links between newsworthiness and public apathy, however, did not stop the Times from publishing in 1973, one of the early books attempting to declare victory on behalf of the Warren Commission. Its author was Commission Counsel David Belin. Salisbury who, in 1964, had authored the excessively complimentary introduction to the Warren Report's Times' edition, wrote a similarly biased introduction for Belin (Anson 139, 142, 153). Any remaining shred of credulity or sincerity left to the New York Times' investigation of the Kennedy Assassination vanished when it was revealed that their publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, had cooperated with CIA Director (later Warren Commissioner) Dulles in spying on Mexico City correspondent Sydney Gruson, physically keeping him away from CIA operations and screening his articles "with a great deal more care than usual," because he "had a reputation with the CIA" for getting "in their hair." Journalist Tim Weiner, who reported those abuses 43 years after anyone could do anything about them, added that "Contacts between the CIA and the U.S. news media -- as well as far deeper relationships -- were common in the 1950s and 1960s and were reported thoroughly 20 years ago." Obviously, the thoroughness of reporting on both past and present CIA/media cooperation, is still severely inadequate. (Tim Weiner [New York Times Service], "Publisher complied with CIA," Austin American-Statesman, Jun. 7, 1997, p. A4.)

194. John F. Kennedy, "The Moral Issue of Equal Rights for All Colors," television address, June 11, 1963 (Kennedy 182, 183). Throughout his political career, Kennedy made similar statements which grow more haunting with each anniversary of his unsolved murder: "For, in a democracy, every citizen, regardless of his interest in politics, `holds office'; every one of us is in a position of responsibility; and, in the final analysis, the kind of government we get depends upon how we fulfill those responsibilities....A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures -- and that is the basis of all human morality" (Profiles in Courage [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956 / Pocket Books, 1957] p. 209). "The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war" ("Cuba Quarantined and Khrushchev Challenged," television address, Oct. 22, 1962 [Kennedy, 92]).

195. Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (New York: The Free Press, 1993) p. 19.

196. For evidence of Ford's obfuscation of key aspects of the Warren Report, see handwritten changes to the draft chapters of the final report that were recommended by Commission member Representative Gerald Ford, Personal Files of J. Lee Rankin, General Counsel of the Warren Commission, President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection housed at the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland; cited in George Lardner, Jr. (The Washington Post), "Ford sought changes in JFK assassination report," Austin American-Statesman, July 3, 1997, p. A8.

197. Paul B. Sheatsley and Jacob J. Feldman, The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, National Opinion Research Center, Stanford University Press, 1965 (large majority). For sources of public opinion for the period Nov. 1963 through Feb. 1977, see: "Studies of Public Reactions," items 1673-1714, Guth and Wrone 174-77. On Sunday, Nov. 24, 1963, soon after Oswald had been shot, Gordon McClendon, owner of Dallas radio station KLIF, reported the following from Cleveland's Municipal Stadium, where 40,000 spectators were attending the Dallas Cowboys-Cleveland Browns football game: "People seem to think that the Dallas Police Department really had the wrong man, or that Oswald was being held for want of a better suspect...No one here that we've talked to -- taxi drivers, hotel employees, the various people we've had an opportunity to be around since we arrived here yesterday afternoon -- no one really thought that Oswald was the guilty party." ("The Fateful Hours: a Presentation of KLIF News in Dallas," Capitol Records, 1964; reissued on audiotape by KLIF, 1993.) For sources of public opinion just before and after the release of the Stone film, see: Kenneth Auchincloss, "Twisted History," Newsweek Dec. 23, 1991, p. 46, and Ted Gest and Joseph Shapiro, "JFK: The Untold Story of the Warren Commission," U.S. News & World Report Aug. 17, 1992, p. 29. R 374 ("no credible evidence").

198. Wills and Demaris 264.

199. Joseph Wilf, "On Holocaust Denial," The Jewish Outlook (Texas: Jewish Federation of Austin), Jan. 1997.

200. Richard Bartholomew's contemporaneous notes from "Washington Journal," with guest David Plotz (C-SPAN cable network, Mar. 29, 1997). The current state of media complacency and susceptibility to government control, seen during the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 and during the Persian Gulf War, was exhibited anew in the 1997 Republic of Texas standoff. Throughout the week-long siege, more than 100 reporters and photographers followed police orders to remain at a roadside rest stop about ten miles from where six members of the Republic of Texas separatist group were holed up and surrounded by Texas Rangers. Journalists could neither see nor hear what they were trying to report to the public. Press conferences by Texas officials dominated their reporting. Amy Gifford, coproducer with her husband Dan Gifford, of the documentary film "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," said "Rodney King can tell you, if there's no one there to see it, it didn't happen." "And the appearance that the government is hiding something is just as bad as hiding something," added Jess Walter, author of a book on the Ruby Ridge standoff, "Every Knee Shall Bow," a former reporter who covered the Ruby Ridge confrontation from a distance of about three miles. (Cara Tanamachi, "Critics say media should be closer to standoff," Austin American-Statesman, May 3, 1997, p. A8.)

201. Paul William Roberts, "Rage against the dying of the right" [critique of Robert H. Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah], The [Toronto] Globe and Mail, Nov. 16, 1996, p. D5. Norman Soloman, "Ignored Oscar Film [on George Seldes] Sets Inspiring Example," Liberal Opinion Week, Mar. 3, 1997, p. 7 (Creators Syndicate, Feb. 23, 1997). Orwell, like most people, could be fooled some of the time, but not all of the time. An essay in The Orwell Reader reveals that Orwell, had he lived to see it, might have had special insight into the JFK assassination. "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" discusses two books by the former-communist-turned-CIA-covert-action-pioneer, who eventually became senior editor at William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review. E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate burglar with numerous ties to the JFK assassination, wrote in his memoirs, "I also met and frequently conferred with Dr. James Burnham, a Princeton classmate of Joe Bryan's and onetime professor of philosophy. Burnham was a consultant to OPC [Office of Policy Coordination, the first covert action group created within the CIA in 1948] on virtually every subject of interest to our organization. He had extensive contacts in Europe and, by virtue of his Trotskyite background, was something of an authority on domestic and foreign Communist parties and front organizations. Through him I was to meet a young Yale graduate, William F. Buckley, Jr...." Hunt recruited Buckley into the CIA and their first project together was opening the infamous Mexico City Station in 1950 (E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent [New York: Berkley, 1974] pp. 69-70. John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives [New York: Simon & Schuster, Touchstone ed., 1990] p. 80.). A decade earlier, in the name of strengthening communism, Burnham severely crippled the U.S. Trotskyite movement by almost single-handedly splitting it into rival factions in 1939. Burnham had shared leadership responsibilities in that movement with Michael Paine's United Fruit-CIA-connected father, George Lyman Paine, Jr. James P. Hosty, Jr., the FBI special agent investigating the Oswalds just before the assassination, has stated that George Paine phoned his son, Michael, from Los Angeles the night of the assassination and said, "`We all know who did this,' and told his son to be careful." If true, the Warren Commission's conflicting evidence about this phone call indicates that it was distancing George Paine's name from the one consistent fact in that evidence: the statement by the caller that someone other than Oswald was responsible for the assassination. (Epstein, Legend 205. Peter Dale Scott, Government Documents and the Kennedy Assassination, [self-published manuscript] ch. II, p. 4. James P. Hosty, Jr., Assignment: Oswald [New York: Arcade Publishing, 1996] p. 39; cited in Martha A. Moyer and R.F. Gallagher, "The Babysitters," The Fourth Decade, Sept. 1996, p. 3. See also note 188 above). After splitting the U.S. Trotskyites, the largest such organization in the world, Burnham then suddenly and mysteriously became anti-communist just in time for both assassination conspiracies against Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940. The first attempt to kill Trotsky, in May, had strange links to the U.S. That conspiracy, along with the second attempt in August, which was successful, later became the focus of intense interest by JFK-assassination figures Isaac Don Levine, and Sylvia and Nathaniel Weyl (Albert Glotzer, Trotsky [Buffalo, New York: Prometheus, 1989] pp. 284-90. Isaac Don Levine, Mind of an Assassin [New York: Farrar, Staus and Cudahy, 1959/Signet, 1960] p. vi. Canfield and Weberman 105-06. Warren Commission Document 662 [FBI report of Mar. 5, 1964 on Nathaniel and Sylvia Weyl, John Martino, Victor Lasky and Frank Meyer]. Scott 55, 288, 289). If Burnham consulted the OPC on virtually every aspect of its operations, one aspect could have been assassinations, begun by the OSS in Algiers as early as 1942. Judging from Orwell's quotations from the two Burnham books, written in 1940 and 1942, Burnham predicted today's U.S. economy, politics and geopolitics with astonishing accuracy; as did Orwell's classic novel, 1984, begun soon after his Burnham essay (The Orwell Reader [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1956] pp. 335-54).

202. David Armstrong, [3-part, investigative report on George Bush] The Austin Chronicle, part 1: "Where Was George? The Answer is Blowin' in the Wind," Dec. 27, 1991, pp. 12-14; hereafter cited as Armstrong. John B. Jovich, ed., Reflections on JFK's Assassination: 250 Famous Americans Remember November 22, 1963 (Woodbine House, 1988) p. 135. David Robb, "Stone Doubts Bush's Faith in Warren Report," Daily Variety, Jan. 7, 1992; reprinted in Stone and Sklar 377-79; hereafter cited as Robb. Simpson 48. Clyde Haberman (The New York Times).

203. "Elie Wiesel's heavy burden," Austin American-Statesman, March 11, 1997, pp. E1, E8 (quote at latter page). Kennedy 271.

204. Richard Bartholomew memo to Elva Gladney: "Grade Recommendations for Mid-term Exams on the JFK Assassination," senior honors history class: "Assassinations of the 20th Century," Pflugerville High School, Oct. 10, 1996. James Baldwin quoted in Norman Soloman, "Media `Peep Show' Gawks at the Poor," Creators Syndicate, May 14, 1997.

205. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1959, 1960/New York: Touchstone, 1981), p. 1037. Brown 526, 538. Paul Marie Verlaine, "Chanson d`Automne [Song of Autumn]," Poemes Saturniens, 1866; cited in Ryan 33, 84-85, 96, 97n., 146. In a worthy example of poetic justice, the title chosen by JFK-assassination activist Charles Drago for his novel about the assassination, Autumn Too Long, echoes the semiotic use of Verlaine's "Chanson d'Automne" as a call to arms for the French resistance. Drago further earned the Verlaine comparison in a speech to an international gathering of conspiracy resistors in Dallas during the 33rd anniversary of the assassination: "As far as the search for justice in the case of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy is concerned, there has been no progress whatsoever...Our reluctance to end formally the `conspiracy/no conspiracy' debate among ourselves amounts to an act of collective cowardice...Our fear of the truth is motivated by the unspoken realization that the death of America's moral authority as a civilized nation is depicted in Z[apruder-film]-frame 313...The absence of moral outrage in our work (with few notable exceptions) is the death knell of our work...We are at war with the murderers of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and with their accessories after the fact; if we are to have the slightest chance of winning that war, we had better begin to think of ourselves and to act in terms of our most appropriate role models: the Viet Cong." In his "Plea For the Declaration of War," Drago wrote: "Who are we? We are the Sioux -- of AIM. We are the Jews -- of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. We are the Viet Cong -- of Tet. We must know ourselves to be freedom fighters." The Drago-Verlaine comparison is made more poetically just by a personal revelation from former CIA Director and former U.S. President George Bush. At the end of his presidency, just prior to the Academy Awards presentation, Bush told reporters that his favorite movie was the film adaptation of Cornelius Ryan's book, The Longest Day, which highlights Verlaine's coded verse. That seemingly innocent choice is, at best, sardonic given Bush's strange biography regarding the JFK assassination and his odd family history regarding fascism. "During a visit to Auschwitz in 1987," wrote Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, "what came out of Bush's mouth was, `Boy, they were big on crematoriums, weren't they?'" Since Sept., 1995, Bush has spoken at several high-profile events sponsored by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon on three continents. The former president has received speaking fees totaling in the millions from Moon's Unification Church. In Jul., 1996, in Washington, speaking at a Moon-sponsored conference, Bush praised The Washington Times, a newspaper founded by Moon, for fostering "sanity." He added that Moon's new paper in Argentina, Tiempos del Mundo, "is going to do the same thing." According to Frederick Clarkson's book, Eternal Hostility, Unification Church operatives "have been close to neo-fascist movements all over the world." The former president lives in Houston and can be subpoenaed under ARCA, which, ironically, Bush himself signed into law. (November In Dallas 1996 Conference Program [JFK/Lancer Productions & Publications, 1996] p. 15. Charles R. Drago, "In the Blossom of Our Sins: An Eleventh Hour Plea For War and Its Absolutions," The Fourth Decade, May, 1997, pp. 4, 6. Armstrong. Robb. Simpson 48. Adamson, "1,000 Points of Light" many references. Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA & George Bush [New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992] 70 references. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994] pp. 356-76. Bruce Campbell Adamson vs. CIA, c-95-20549 RMW, Affidavit and Motion to produce documents from the George Bush Presidential Library, U.S. District Court, Judge Ronald M. Whyte. Sarah Hornaday [Associated Press], "Governor [George W. Bush] salutes Holocaust survivors," Austin American-Statesman, May 7, 1997, p. B8. Jeff Jacoby [Boston Globe; New York Times News Service], "Want to rent an ex-president? Call George Bush," Austin American-Statesman, Jun. 7, 1997, p. A11. Norman Solomon, "How Bush Got a Golden Parachute from Moon," Creators Syndicate, Jul. 31, 1997.)

206. Robert S. Boyd (Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau), "Jupiter moon has sea and -- possibly -- life," Austin American-Statesman, Apr. 10, 1997, p. A1. Matt Crenson (Associated Press), "Pathfinder sends photos from Mars," Austin American-Statesman, Jul. 5, 1997, p. A1.

207. Yaron Svoray and Nick Taylor with an introduction by Simon Wiesenthal, In Hitler's Shadow (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1994) p. x. We began and ended "The Gun That Didn't Smoke" with reference to the words of Walt W. Rostow because he and his critique of the Warren Report best summarize and symbolize the past, present and future since the assassination of President Kennedy. The most succinct proof of that symbolism can be found in two articles by Vincent Salandria, one of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission's minority opinion of the JFK case. First is "The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: A Model of Explanation," an insightful statement about the nature of the assassination. Second is "The Promotion of Domestic Discord," which discusses covert politics and the clandestine state. Both of these items first appeared in Computers and Automation magazine, issues 20 (Dec. 1971, pp. 32-40) and 21 (Jan. 1972, pp. 37-39, 40). They were re-published together by the Internet-based publication, Fair Play Magazine (http://rmii.com/~jkelin/fp.html, issue 16, May-Jun., 1997). Salandria warned: "Chaos is required to make a people willing to accept such strong medicine as is administered by the secret police in order to restore order and to stabilize a disintegrating society. It takes an acutely sick society to be able to accept as palatable the terrible cure -- totalitarianism...We must be alert to the CIA agents who would promote the polarization of our society. We must examine the evidence which indicates that fake revolutionaries, who are inciting insurrection in our cities, have had their pockets and minds stuffed by the CIA." Salandria analyzes the role of former Kennedy-Johnson advisor McGeorge Bundy in the assassination and in social polarization. Rostow is mentioned only twice by Salandria, but in an important context. Rostow was and is the late McGeorge Bundy's alter-ego. From his three headquarters on the University of Texas at Austin campus, including the top floor of the LBJ Library, Rostow has, in recent years, launched a drive to revive the largely minority community of East Austin. The Austin Project, as the experiment is known, "...calls for a wide range of social programs allegedly aimed at improving conditions among the poor. But most East Austin activists believe Rostow's plans are misguided." (Robert Bryce, "Liberal, Conservative or Just the Right Thing to Do?" The Austin Chronicle, Sept. 25, 1992; cited in David G. Armstrong, The True Believer [unpublished manuscript], p. 51. See also: Lee Kelly, "Austinites stay up late with the Clintons," Austin American-Statesman, Sept. 19, 1993, p. F3. Debbie Graves, "Ex-UT president wins top U.S. science award," Austin American-Statesman, Sept. 29, 1993, pp. B1, B4. "UT professor, former president honored at White House ceremony," (Cox News Service) Austin American-Statesman, Oct. 1, 1993, p. B5. "Possible Discovery" 9-12, 14-20, 24, 25, 30, 31, 39, 43, 45, 51-53, 56, 59, 60, 83, 84, 96, 98, 100, 132, 144, 150, 152.) Walt Rostow lives in Austin and can be subpoenaed under ARCA.